Outdoors: Now's the time when deer are looking for love

Monday

Oct 28, 2013 at 6:00 AMOct 29, 2013 at 1:22 AM

Mark Blazis Outdoors

Halloween is treat time for Northeast deer hunters. The late Johnny Boll, who hosted many Worcester County hunters at his lodge in Stuyvesant, N.Y., spoke ex cathedra when it came to deer. Boll had enough collisions and near misses with love-crazed deer on dark, ghost-and-goblin nights to proclaim strongly that Halloween marks the onset of the rut.

While admittedly no scientist, Boll knew deer from a lifetime of observation. No one could put up a stand or dress a deer faster either, or keep his hunters more motivated. When action slowed, he'd always say, "Wait till Halloween."

Increased deer activity, especially chasing and mating, is spurred on by increasing hormone levels caused by diminishing light entering their optic nerve and affecting their brains. A concurrent increase of moonlight now provides the double trigger that sets off a doe's estrous cycle. With odor-detecting capabilities vastly transcending ours, bucks react immediately.

When they smell doe hormones secreted in urine and vaginal discharges, bucks go through a behavioral metamorphosis, briefly emerging from their reclusive, nocturnal lifestyle. The rut is this forest hermit's coming-out party.

At any hour, cruising bucks looking for love become uncharacteristically oblivious to danger. Boll always pointed to the first week of November for "all hell to break loose," and predicted that the rut would build to a climax from about the 10th to the 14th and continue with decreasing intensity through about the 20th.

On those ephemeral, special days, bucks handicapped by testosterone blinders run with monomaniacal abandon, enchanted by does' hormonal perfume wafting irresistibly in the breeze.

At these moments, deer hunters turn to synthetic and real doe urine commercial attractants, often spending more on them than on their own mate's perfumes. Tinks No. 69 is far more popular for deer hunters than Chanel No. 5, and the likes of Golden Estrous, Code Blue, Trails End, Harmon's and Mrs. Doe Pee all get squirted out in great volumes. Our forests never smell hotter than during the rut.

Following female pheromones, bucks run not only through fields and forests, but also across roads and highways. When you can mate only a few days a year, you can get pretty desperate. Our drivers will experience several thousand deer collisions, mostly around now. A state with a greater deer population like Pennsylvania may have 40,000 collisions. Towns without hunting put their citizens at greater risk. Better an arrow than a family car. Better venison on the table than a carcass on the side of the road.

While Boll's calculations have proven fairly reliable, some years his dates have been off. The deer tricked us. He didn't completely understand the influence of the full moon, though he did notice that full moons tend to keep deer out feeding and misbehaving all night, leading them to bed earlier than normal and proving more difficult to hunt.

Any day now, we should anticipate wild but variable daily activity extending for the next few weeks, especially during the entire third week of November.

Every year, some hunters complain of a bad rut. They're often hunting when a buck successfully finds a hot doe and is sedentarily attending her. The two may remain hidden. Their lack of visible activity shouldn't mislead us to think mating isn't occurring. On the contrary, their secretive honeymoon is the true climactic moment of the rut.

During this complex and frenetically competitive mating period, we can easily get confused as to what's really happening. Young bucks, for example, lose out to big bucks in straight-out mating competition, so they're relegated to chasing does at every opportunity, sneaking in whenever they can. Being of inferior strength, they have to work on the periphery of time and space to get their chances. So we shouldn't be surprised by their early or late chasing. I observed a spike chasing does on Oct. 22 this season.

To trick sex-maddened bucks — unless we're just very lucky — we need to endure patiently the ebbs and flows of action and inaction. We need to take full advantage of their very brief misuse of normally invincible senses, especially their extraordinary sense of smell. Though each year 80 percent of us will fail, the potential treats of good venison and a magnificent rack are more than enough to drive us on to try.